The Emmy-nominated, whip-smart writer-producer-performer has already left her mark on The Office, and now the relatable ironicist goes rom-com.

Mindy Kaling warns me that we might run out of gas. We're darting in and out of L.A. traffic in her red MINI Cooper, jerking toward the Palihouse, a trendy boutique hotel in West Hollywood where we plan to have lunch. "On principle, I drive until there's not a drop left," she says. "Then it's an earned trip. Don't be alarmed!" She's chatting at a harried clip, and there's a restless energy about her as she apologizes for the traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard that brings to mind Kelly Kapoor, the impossibly self-absorbed but strangely self-aware customer service rep on The Office who chirps her way through streams of consciousness, like when declaring her love for "pink, the color; Pink, the person...; basically anything that is awesome." Even Kaling's pink-and-white gingham nails and her new purple Dita sunglasses seem to channel the fashion-obsessed office gossip. But while Kapoor is essentially a composite caricature of a celebrity-worshipping culture, the 31-year-old Kaling who plays her to vapid perfection is a writer and co-executive producer on The Office who recently signed a seven-figure deal with NBC to develop her own sitcom for the network. She's also finishing a book of essays and just whipped out The Low Self-Esteemof Lizzie Gillespie, a rom-com due to hit theaters this year. "I'm a very impatient person, especially with comedy," Kaling says. "I'm not a careful writer. I think the funniest things come very fast." They do: In our five-minute drive, I'm complaining about strip malls and point to a charmless storefront. "You don't like Fashion Clothes—the store? I find it very straightforward," she says. "They don't spend a lot of time trying to tell you what it is." She points to a medical marijuana dispensary called The Farmacy: "That's the opposite of Fashion Clothes."

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We park right in front of the Palihouse ("So sweet!" Kaling exclaims), and grab a table in the sunny courtyard, where we order burgers and fries. Kaling's rapid-fire, girly-delight-meets-Seinfeldian-scrutiny makes it impossible not to like her—as does her constant, near-breathless Twitter feed, e.g., "I wanna have my own tv show, then be a movie star, then get super political, then when I'm old and irrelevant have my own tv show again."

Her quips crank on overdrive in The Office writer's room, according to Brent Forrester, an Office colleague whom Kaling recruited to cowrite Lizzie Gillespie. "If I get three laughs in a row, you can bet she's going to get the fourth," he says. Kaling was hired by executive producer Greg Daniels in 2004; his wife, Susanne (a former senior exec at Lifetime Networks), brought him to see Kaling in the L.A. run of Matt & Ben, an off-Broadway hit play Kaling cowrote after graduating from Dartmouth. It's about Matt Damon and Ben Affleck's sudden rise to fame after—as Kaling's version goes—the screenplay for Good Will Hunting falls out of the sky. When Daniels was importing the British Office, he received a spec script by Kaling and called her for a meeting. "She was incredibly shy," says Daniels, "which is really funny when you think about her personality—but very funny on the page." Seven years later, she's considered a reliable barometer for what will draw laughs in living rooms.

"You could be sitting there with a couple people and an idea seems pretty funny," Forrester says. "But ultimately you're going to want to run it by someone who, if that person laughs, it's funny. And is going to add some other spin that makes it funnier. Mindy is one of those people."

Growing up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her parents (both Indian immigrants) and older brother, Kaling often cracked jokes at home but was taught by her mother, a surgeon, and father, an architect, to be respectful and demure at school. She stayed "largely silent," she says, until her teen years. In tenth grade, she enrolled in a high school satire class at the Cambridge prep school Buckingham Browne & Nichols, in which she studied Mark Twain and Jonathan Swift and learned the difference between parody and satire. She also spent many hours dreaming about her adult life and admits to planning her wedding at 15. "The one thing that's gotten more exaggerated as I've gotten older is my sense of fantasy," she says. Kaling, who's "only ever had three boyfriends," never dated until after college—she's currently seeing someone she declines to discuss "because who knows what will happen by the time this [article] comes out"—and perhaps because she managed to avoid the disillusioning reality of teenage boys, she developed an insatiable appetite for meet-cute fantasies, à la her favorite, Nora Ephron's You've Got Mail.

But no matter how many happily-ever-afters Kaling imbibes, when she actually writes romance—like in "Niagara," the Office episode when Jim and Pam get married, which earned Kaling an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series—it's both touching and free of schtick. In the episode, Pam is a pregnant wreck and accidentally tears her veil; Jim snips off half his tie to console her. They escape their Dunder Mifflin colleagues to elope on a tour boat under Niagara Falls. "People always say the most romantic times are when you're sitting on the couch together watching your favorite show," Kaling says, "not when you're in a black dress at the top of some building. It's never the thing you think it's going to be."

Jim and Pam's love story is one of the truly great, resonant TV romances. It ignited in season one with the nice-guy paper salesman longing after the sweetly unassuming receptionist, and unfolded almost in real time, a slow-burning flame with achingly realistic buildup. "We would have huge debates over what should happen with their relationship," Daniels says. "Sometimes the debate would continue after we'd already shot the scene. Mindy would often come running in later, saying, `I just want it a little different!' "

A do-or-die fight for the smallest detail is typical Kaling; her first few years on staff, she'd get so worked up about a script idea, she'd burst into tears and leave the room.

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"She's the most fiery person I've ever met," says B. J. Novak, Kaling's Office co-writer, co-executive producer, and real-life best friend who also plays Ryan, Kelly's perpetually indifferent love interest. "Sometimes in a moment of frustration with a movie studio or network executive, she'll throw up her hands and say, `That's it! I'm out. I'm going to get married and have five kids and never write again.' She always means it 100 percent, but it never lasts more than 10 minutes."

Truly, Kaling can't keep the wheels from spinning—even when she's been dumped. A couple of years ago, Kaling was dating a guy she wasn't even attracted to, who broke it off out of the blue. She asked Forrester to help channel her outrage into Lizzie Gillespie, about a girl who sells herself short by dating "safe" guys who she knows will never leave—until one of them does. They wrote the script in the lobby of the Casa del Mar, with its velvet couches, high windows, and sparkling views of the Santa Monica pier—the perfect refuge for a heartbroken girl who loves Hollywood glamour. Kaling would drive to the hotel from her home in West Hollywood, valet her MINI Cooper, and she and Forrester would overtip their waiters (renting an office on the cheap) and spend afternoons as daydreamy, industrious American screenwriters: Dorothy Parker at the Algonquin meets Larry David at the Westway Diner.

Kaling's idealism runs deep; her family "didn't tolerate sarcasm at all," she says. "It was the biggest crime you could commit, like saying, `I don't respect you enough to straightforwardly address this problem, so I'm just gonna hide behind it.' " Her book of essays (tentatively titled The Contents of My Purse), will be PG rants, e.g., how flowers make the worst hostess gift because you have to ditch your cocktail and go cut stems in the kitchen. "If I had all these vices, like an addiction to plastic surgery, and I slept around with this great list of guys," she says, "then every year I would come out with a best-seller that had some pun title about each vice because I know I could make a lot of money doing that. But that's not why people are interested in me." Of her contemporaries, Kaling seems to be tracking Tina Fey, not only because she identifies as a writer first, but also because in 30 Rock's Liz Lemon, Fey has created a female character who reminds us of someone we know—or could be—without an exaggerated overload of tragic flaws. Kaling plans to do the same for film: Lizzie Gillespie will not be one where women "sit at brunch and make ribald jokes and weird puns loudly," she says.

"In Sex and the City, you have characters who are four different parts of a woman's brain," says Nathan Kahane, president of Mandate Pictures, which produced Juno and has bought Lizzie Gillespie. "Mindy combines those parts into a single character. You might have a girl you perceive one way, and she completely surprises you."

Kahane adds that Kaling's fresh perspective is a function of her outsiderness, that as a "woman of color walking into a world that is boys, and white, with institutional gender expectations and traditional notions of beauty, she has a way of seeing it all, laughing at it, and making her voice heard."

But Kaling counts herself as a peer, not an example."I might be the only Indian female comedy writer, but I find it really irrelevant," she says. "People have asked me, `Will you come speak on behalf of Asian American writers?' And I'm like, `Put me with successful performers, and I can be an inspiration because I can hold up with these white men, who are also my friends and colleagues. Don't make me this other thing.' "

Clearly, Kaling is driven in ways that women are often crucified for—or avoid altogether for fear of seeming disagreeable. "Mindy is very competitive, as are many superambitious people," Forrester tells me. "Comedy is one of the great ways of getting people's attention, and Mindy and I both have more than the average desire to get that attention."

For the time being, Kaling says she has "the exact right amount of fame that anyone could ever want." No one's following her to her car or probing her personal life—and she can still get blissfully starstruck. "Cillian Murphy just walked by," she says suddenly. "I find him really cute..."

Her real celebrity crush is Clive Owen—"someone I'm never going to meet."

"Not even at an awards show?"

"We're never going to be invited to the same awards show."

"What about the Emmys?"

"No, he would never do TV."

"The Oscars—surely you'll go one year?"

"The same year that he goes?"

There's no arguing with Kaling. In any case, it seems best to let her stay starry-eyed.

"I always want to write as though if someone were to photograph me, it would look like this amazing photo caught in time," she says. "Or if I died the next day, they'd be like, `Look at her at work.' And I'd look so cool."